Also, from a dev perspective having designs updates without some process is undesirable.
The majority are not good employees.
Good employees can collaborate well with LaTeX as well. Yet over 99% of workplaces will not use LaTeX.
The point is that even in places where about half the employees know how to collaborate with these tools, it is not done because you need the other employees to function.
Now, many people tried Gimp (which is far from Photoshop) and they wrongly think that Inkscape is another Gimp.
I do like gimp as a bit of a Swiss army knife program, it can do a lot of utility jobs like resizing, outlining, etc which can be hard in some of the more intuitive modern apps, but most of my work now is done on an app like Procreate and then I'll move to gimp for the final edits.
There are other photo editing tools with better UI, but poorer features, sadly. It would take a ton of work to catch up in terms of features.
You might find that fact to be on the ageing side :) Unified Transform tool has been available for many years now. It's all three (and more) tools in one.
So were toilets once upon a time.
I am not a fan of webapps, but this line of argument doesn't hold water
—-
real-time collab is not exclusive to webapps.
Sure, but once you make the effort required to build a real time app, there are vanishingly few reasons why not to have it as a web app. Some of them provide a desktop app as well but they all provide a web app.
As a designer, you can just send a link to your design to anyone, end users, clients, developers, managers. And they just click it and it shows up and works. No need for installing software, setting up accounts, etc. A lot of these web apps are actually C++ and then compiled to web assembly so they are quite fast.
It's obviously not just "two clicks", it's "Text copy 2 final final alt reviewed.doc" and then you get a new person email their suggested updates to you as "Text copy 2 final 2.doc" and you have to somehow merge those suggestions in with the head version.
With Word at least there's the ability to do suggestions rather than direct edits to let you collaborate against nonsynced docs at all, but with Inkscape when that happens you'll literally just get a different svg and you can't actually merge at all, instead you'd need to conceptually understand what edits were made and then make them again manually to the "head" version, which is completely redundant work.
Same effort as reviewing the file history
Copy + PasteGit helps by forcing the deltas to be knowable, but at the expense of a complex management tool and only really working on text based source. All other modern software now solves this problem by being online collaborative which eliminates the problem entirely, and that benefit dwarfs any other feature for most corporate/organizational usecases.
Inkscape is great software, but it's not acceptable software if you're going to collaborate with multiple other people who will all be making edits to the same document.